Judy

“To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo

“On the phone, we argue. In person, we tend to become sarcastic. Our letters, though, have a touch of romantic collusion.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“There’s a biblical saying that translates roughly as “First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo